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Erris and Shiver go over the highlights of development in the week of Star Citizen

Calling All Devs

AI Crew can compete and possibly out do human players aiming wise.

AI will be up to the task to compete with human players. AI crewmembers can, for example, already aim with a 96% accuracy which will surpass most human counterparts. The difficulties in creating NPC crewmen will be programming different gameplay mechanics like job prioritisation and repair of ship items. To get these working efficiently will take some time.

Additional movement like booster jumps through the EVA-thrusters have been talked about. Grappling hooks and other devices haven’t been considered yet. If they plan to add additional movement functionalities into the game, they would try to utilise the EVA-thrusters of your space suit. These would add booster jumps or softer landings after falls to your movement repertoire.

EU vehicle team is working at the moment on misfires and wear and tear of ship items. (misfiring of damaged power plants or other items which have an affect on the ship systems and final ship performance). The next step will then be have these physical entities integrated into the ships, so you can see in game that an item is damaged as well as be affected by the unit’s damage. This tech is tied in with Object Container Streaming (OCS). So when the outside of your ship is damaged in a certain place, for example, your power plant OCS will then communicate with the inside of your ship and transfer the appropriate damage and damage model to the power plant.

CIG plans on implementing character survival properties like thirst, hunger or drunkenness for example. At the moment the hooks for these systems are being worked on, so they can be tied to specific game systems. I.E. being able to shower when dirty. These are being used and added for SQ42.

CIG will introduce knock-downs and knock-backs (staggers) soon™, this is part of the effort to increase time to kill a player, as a player and CIG wish to avoid instant kills in the PU. This will, later on tie into the healing mechanics change. The medpen, for example, currently is a full heal but in the future it will only be a temporary heal which will deteriorate over time while the player has to find a full heal solution like a hospital or medical bay to be healed. More detail about CIGs future plans on healing will be explained in a future RTV.

ATV

Turrets weren’t properly gyrostabilising on pitch and yaw. It was only on yaw, so CIG are introducing the ability to gyrostabilise on pitch and yaw within the constraints of the turret. CIG also reduced the dead zone which will give a little more feedback to the players, so that they can find the targets better. CIG will introduce the ability to separate the dead zone from the actual turret look constraints and the interaction constraints, and finally add a little bit of aim assist. So, getting your lag pip pretty close to the target will allow you to stay on target better and allow your guns to actually hit the target that you are aiming at … and these are all planned for 3.2.1.

To eventually get the massive amounts of planned star systems and locations into the PU the devs will need the help of some pretty powerful tools, many of which are developed inhouse. One such tool is the new Construct System which moves procedural construction from the Python programming language to C++, improving speed and maintainability and allowing CIG to create some pretty cool environments.

RtV

Ship Shape:

300 series has begun its rework, early whitebox.

Banu Defender & 890 Jump are there too.

Scheduled for Q1 2019

Freelancer Variants have started. They’re in grey box.

Intended for 3.4

F8 lightning is in final art

Mustang has gone backwards back to final art, after feedback from Chris

Hammerhead is in final

600i is waiting for tech setup

The Apollo

RSI ship

Small clinic that can fly to the edge of space. 6 patient beds, 2 crew.

There are no modules being provided yet. Right now the ship will only have tier 3. They’ll decide about other modules later.

Medical Gameplay:

3.2 is fairly simple. You get injuries, use a medipen to heal them. That’s it.

Lots of Death of a Spaceman is still completely accurate, what they plan to do. They had thought there needed to be a giant design post about what’s changed, but they don’t need to, nothing’s changed.

They want more persistent damage, figure out respawning etc… but the core of it is still relevant.

They do introduce the tier systems - normal, hurt, damaged, ruined.

In the future, you’ll enter a non-death state.

Tier 2 - when you get to the ruined state in limbs, you lose functionality, right now you can heal with medipen. Tier 2 that medipen won’t heal anymore, won’t be able to jump, sprint, etc… long-term effects from damage.

Tier 1 - near death experiences - something’s gone badly wrong, you need to get help stat or you’ll die, and you’ll have more problems anyway when you come back. Death of a Spaceman talks about repeated deaths, persistent accumulation of effects, etc… Tier 1 is giant healing those things.

Apollo features

Uses drones & medical stretchers.

Drones get sent out, encase a person on a protective field, bring them back into the ship.

Supposed to have a docking collar, so it’ll be able to get close to big ships anyway. It’s not a small ‘can it fit’ ship. It’s a larger ship.

Apollo v Cutlass Red

Cutlass Red has 1 bed inside. Can’t take a lot of patients. Get in, grab someone, get them to a hospital.

Cutlass is also a medium fighter, Apollo has almost 0 fighting ability.

Cutlass Red is a combat ambulance. Small, but faster with armament. Apollo’s more like a Dr. Clinic, Endeavour is a hospital.

Q: Endeavour had a respawn mechanic, any talk on that for the Apollo

Something that comes with medical ships. The Tier 1 beds will likely be the respawn points. Endeavour will have them out of the box, the Apollo you can make it have one if you want to, the Cutlass Red likely won’t have tier 1 beds.

The Apollo will be an advancement of the RSI visuals, but it still ties into everything. Lots of inspiration from bengal, polaris, connie, etc…

Crew required - 2. Max crew - 2.

Can a Cutlass Red dock? - TBD

Can the ship be used for cargo? Yes

Drones available? 2

Diff. between variants? Armour, maneuverability, missiles (2 s3)

Will it have flashing red lights? - not in concept images. It’s left open.

How long to heal a player? - too early to say, depends on what injuries

Bathrooms? Yes

Any other vehicles fit in the Apollo? - technically a bike, yes.

How fast in Quantum? - same band as ships with medium drives. Freelancers and vanguards.

If you bring someone aboard faking injury, does it have a brig? - probably just send ‘em out the bottom of the bed.

Automated drones, or flown by player? - want to make it player driven. Expect them to be player controlled.

Can the drones kidnap people unwillingly? - No. person has to be immobile.

The consummate English gentleman, Shiver Bathory can be found posting news to The Relay, when not making puns that is.When not typing furiously at his keyboard he enjoys hanging in chat with The Relay community and every once in awhile can be found playing some game or another. Every Wednesday on The Base he hosts Dead Air - An alternative and extreme metal music show